Basically, by maintaining strict openness to the evidence, it takes away any motivation and justification you might have had for being unfair to me.
Am I missing some context here? Let’s look at this hypothetical conversation, which seems pretty darn plausible to me:
“Wait, you thought that was a rule, not a request to be less messy?”
“What the hell kind of nitpick is that? Stop arguing stupid semantics! Since when should I even have to ask Your Highness for basic decency?”
“Do you actually think that messiness is correlated with thievery, even after conditioning on honesty?”
“What are you even talking about now? Some math shit? That’s what’s really important to you, huh, rather than being a good person who knows when to clean up? Grow up or go live on the street. And don’t take any more of my cookies.”
This is admittedly a strained use of the specific quotations, but I think the directional picture should be clear. Extrapolate to your (least) favorite contested-valence social markers to taste.
I think the first thing to note here is that the bar isn’t “Is there zero chance of secure response failing to exonerate me?” but “Is the secure response less likely to exonerate me?”.
Surely this depends on your surroundings?
What is the “secure response”? One where you try outwardly to retain a certain kind of dignity? When you don’t actually have the status security in local social reality, you can’t necessarily get away with that. In the inconvenient world that I’m currently imagining from which I generated the above dialogue, screwing around with things like ‘evidence’, or even acting calm (thus implying that the rules (which every non-evil person can infer from their heart, right?) are not a threat to you or that you think you’re above them—see also, some uses of “god-fearing” as a prerequisite for “acceptable” in religious contexts), is breaking the social script. It’s presumed to be trying to confuse matters or go around the problem (the problem that they have with you; think “skipping out on your court date” as an analogy in a less emotional context), and it gets you the most guaranteed negative judgment because you didn’t even meta-respect what was going on. Your mainline options under that kind of regime can be more like “use a false apology to submit, after which the entire social reality is that You Did It but at least you showed some respect” or “make a counterplay by acting openly defensive, which acts kind of like a double-or-nothing coin flip depending on whether the audience both believes you and believes enough others will believe you to coordinate against the accuser”. (In this context, the audience may culturally share the felt-sense of “don’t try to get all fancy on us” even if their beliefs about your specific guilt may vary.) Naturally, as Kaj_Sotala described above, refusing to say anything at all can be interpreted as a tacit admission, so that doesn’t help either.
Maybe you could say that the type of emotional and motivational backing for what “acting defensive” means in that context is substantially different from the type of “defensive insecurity” being described above, but at least when I imagine the experiences and expressions they come out close to indistinguishable. I can also imagine trying to retain a feeling of security on the inside (likely at great mental cost) while play-acting the defensiveness in the above context, but that seems like a very noncentral case.
Now for extra fun, imagine this being simultaneously watched by people whose main experience is in a different cultural regime where (perhaps due to the above type of control being uncommon and frowned upon) they can more reasonably justify defensiveness as evidence in favor of guilt, except you don’t have separate private channels to those people and to the people above—possibly because you don’t even know which subset of people is which—and everything you do is being interpreted by both.
Am I missing some context here? Let’s look at this hypothetical conversation, which seems pretty darn plausible to me:
“Wait, you thought that was a rule, not a request to be less messy?”
“What the hell kind of nitpick is that? Stop arguing stupid semantics! Since when should I even have to ask Your Highness for basic decency?”
“Do you actually think that messiness is correlated with thievery, even after conditioning on honesty?”
“What are you even talking about now? Some math shit? That’s what’s really important to you, huh, rather than being a good person who knows when to clean up? Grow up or go live on the street. And don’t take any more of my cookies.”
This is admittedly a strained use of the specific quotations, but I think the directional picture should be clear. Extrapolate to your (least) favorite contested-valence social markers to taste.
Surely this depends on your surroundings?
What is the “secure response”? One where you try outwardly to retain a certain kind of dignity? When you don’t actually have the status security in local social reality, you can’t necessarily get away with that. In the inconvenient world that I’m currently imagining from which I generated the above dialogue, screwing around with things like ‘evidence’, or even acting calm (thus implying that the rules (which every non-evil person can infer from their heart, right?) are not a threat to you or that you think you’re above them—see also, some uses of “god-fearing” as a prerequisite for “acceptable” in religious contexts), is breaking the social script. It’s presumed to be trying to confuse matters or go around the problem (the problem that they have with you; think “skipping out on your court date” as an analogy in a less emotional context), and it gets you the most guaranteed negative judgment because you didn’t even meta-respect what was going on. Your mainline options under that kind of regime can be more like “use a false apology to submit, after which the entire social reality is that You Did It but at least you showed some respect” or “make a counterplay by acting openly defensive, which acts kind of like a double-or-nothing coin flip depending on whether the audience both believes you and believes enough others will believe you to coordinate against the accuser”. (In this context, the audience may culturally share the felt-sense of “don’t try to get all fancy on us” even if their beliefs about your specific guilt may vary.) Naturally, as Kaj_Sotala described above, refusing to say anything at all can be interpreted as a tacit admission, so that doesn’t help either.
“Agitated? Listen to this guy. He’s fucking agitated!” “Well, good. That’s good. You stay that way.”
Maybe you could say that the type of emotional and motivational backing for what “acting defensive” means in that context is substantially different from the type of “defensive insecurity” being described above, but at least when I imagine the experiences and expressions they come out close to indistinguishable. I can also imagine trying to retain a feeling of security on the inside (likely at great mental cost) while play-acting the defensiveness in the above context, but that seems like a very noncentral case.
Now for extra fun, imagine this being simultaneously watched by people whose main experience is in a different cultural regime where (perhaps due to the above type of control being uncommon and frowned upon) they can more reasonably justify defensiveness as evidence in favor of guilt, except you don’t have separate private channels to those people and to the people above—possibly because you don’t even know which subset of people is which—and everything you do is being interpreted by both.